PORTFOLIO THE MYSTICAL CODE V&A LATE
LIHUA LI
Kumar Aviral Jiahuang Yang (Jane)
Lihua Li
Yao Liu
Eleni Xynogala
Bin Wang ( Gary)
Group Members
Yue Hu ( Yorick)
Index
01
Research
Brainstorm Individual Research
02
Feasibility Analysis
03
Prototype Testing Difficulties
05
Learning Something New
Idea improvment Accessment
04
Exhibition Feedbacks
The project aim to do follow things: -To educate and excite ; -It should be accessible, fun and informative to the audience; -Have a high degree of interactivity, surprise or game mechanics to engage a broad audience in your ideas.
01
Research Brainstorm
We started from brainstorming. Our undestanding of ‘mystical’ and ‘code’ were various. For ‘mystical’, we related to eye element, light and shadow, Chakra, tree of life, yingyang, ghost, magic. For ‘code’, we thought of morse code, tarot, maya civilization... In order to get more insights, we decided to spend one day on researching independently and then had a discussion.
01
Research Individual Research
After I did some research of Occultism , I found something very interesting, which was a syllabic script called NUSHU. It was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. It also had been included in the unicode standard since June 2017. I was impressed by this beautiful characters and I also heard of it from a movie called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. The invention of NUSHU based on context that the women could not learn chinese characters in ancient China, in order to communicate with their female friends, they created NUSHU.
02
Feasibility Analysis Idea Improvement & Accessment
After we discussed about our own research resourses, we came up with around 10 ideas. It became a tough decision to narrow down our ideas becase everyone had their own thoughts and interests. Finally, we concluded three concepts. Although I was willing to persude my teamembers to consider NUSHU, they did not have much enthusiastic for it and they thought that NUSHU was difficult for audiences to understand. I felt like I had to choose between my personal interest and my group’s interest. As this was a collabarative work, learning to listen to others’ opinions was quite important in some way. Then I chose to focus on one of these three concepts - The Alchemy.
We got some insights from the transforming of base metal into noble metals in Alchemy. We created a similar model that representted the process of transforming. The model included Input, Medium and Output. Audience could interact with the model through magical spells which was like a decoding process.
We got some feedbacks after we presented our concepts in our class. Firstly, we needed to check the reliability of the synbol - The spirit and soul of man. Because this synbol was unfamiliar with people.
We found this synbol through internet. We gave up this synbol because there was no realible information that could make sure if it is realible synbol from Alchemy.
02
Feasibility Analysis Idea Improvement & Prototypes
“Make of a man and woman a circle; then a quadrangle; out of this a triangle; make again a circle, and you will have the Stone of the Wise. Thus is made the stone, which thou canst not discover, unless you, through diligence, learn to understand this geometrical teaching.” John Read. From Alchemy to Chemistry London: G. Bell. 1957. p. 29.
We got inspiration from the synbol of Philosopher’s stone because the synbol represented the Alchemy and our audiences were familiar with it, which enabled our artwork to connect with our audiences. Eleni and I were using iron wire to prototype the synbol.
Yao Liu and I went to the Winter Light exhibition in Canary Wharf, we got inspiration from one of the installation, ENESS, Sonic Light Bubble. When audiences approached or touched it, the installation pulsated with light and sound. Emitting a warm glow through 236 programmed LEDs as it constantly generated new visual patterns to a unique sound track.
After we decided our artwork’s shape, we started to think about the interactive effect. According to the philosopher’s stone was a legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals into gold. Because gold was material with metallic lustre, we tried to use light to represent this character. In addition, we would like to use speech recognition to control the effect of the light Audiences pronounced some magical spells to decode.
03
Testing Difficulties
In order to implement the speech recognition function to our installation, Yorick and I tried to achieve it by using different method. Yorick used the Arduino and Voice Module. I tried to use speech recognition on the Raspberry Pi 3. However, there were various challenges during the experiment process. For example, my raspberry pi could not download library because the limits of authority to access to the internet, so it took me several days to deal with the problems. Yorick also got stuck in the voice module , the module could not reconigze our voice but we didn’t know why. As we only had 1 weeks to make our work works, so we had to change the interaction ways. We considered that the place where we showed our artwork would be crowded, it was impossible to detect the audiences’ voices. So we decidedd to change to leap motion to control the LEDs effect of our installation. As we had different opinion about the size of the diameter of the outmost circle. I tried to use paper to prototype it and show it through vision. (one is 70MM,another one is 120MM) Finally,We choose the size 70 MM because the 120 MM one was difficult for audiences to see the light effect. Besides, the bigger size we choosed, the much more money we had to paid for it.
04
Exhibition Feedbacks
Finally, we set up our artwork in the V&A Lates: Code exhibition. They were hundreds of visitors in the exhibition. At frist, I felt a little bit nevous to introduce it to our audience as I was not confident for my english. I tried to talk about our work with a Chinese audience by using my mother language firstly and then I organised my words through memos. It was a better way for me to explain my thoughts to others more clearly and logic. I noticed that the more audiences I talked to, the more feedbacks I got. Some feedbacks were really constructive, for example, some visitors were curious about the look of our work and they tried to interact with it and wave their hands when they standed in the front of it. The visitors also got that the synbol of the philosophers’ stone is a metaphor for current technology, to rethought that what technology would be and how it effected our life in the future. They felt fun and informative. Besides, our work have a high degree of interactivity, surprise or game mechanics to engage a broad audience in your ideas.
05
Learning Something New In order to improve my graphic design ability, I learned a design software called Indesign through my classmates, Judy, Jasmine and Yorick.
As I was interested in speech recognition with Arduino, so I learnt this skill from Pipe who using this method in her final project of MA course. She was very helpful and kind, I really appreciated this. Also, I learnt a lot during the process of working with my teammates. For example, there were a lot of unusual and surprising ideas from Eleni. Jane is good at 3d modeling, she made good visual models help us to understand our concepts, which was really helpful. As we came from different disciplines background and different culture, we spend a lot of time and energy on explaining our thoughts, which was exhausted initially. I tried to adjust myself to work with other teammates, which was beneficial to improve my communication capability and looked at things through different angles through coorperated with others.
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